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Allusion is not Illusion
You'll pry my books off my cold, dead body. By the time you shift them all I'll be flat and dessicated.
Currently reading
Winter's Tales
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Already Dead
The Rings of Saturn
Lady Audley's Secret
Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" - And How You Can Fight Back
The City, Not Long After
You Can Sketch: A Step-by-Step Guide for Absolute Beginners
Lonely Werewolf Girl
I'm sorry I didn't know about this book as a child, I think it would have been a favorite. It is very much in the tradition of classic British children's fantasy, a la E Nesbit and Edward Eager.
Moving to a new house near Haworth, young Max finds a set of wooden soldiers hidden in the attic. Once the possession of the Bronte children, the soldiers have taken on the identities from the Brontes' youthful stories and come to life.
The plot is charming and gentle, and Clarke portrays the modern children's personalities and relationships very convincingly.
There are some gems here for adults as well. I loved eight-year-old Max's attempt at cultural relativism:
My one major complaint is not with the author at all. I have the first American edition, by Coward-McCann (1963). I hope they are (or were, since I think they were absorbed by Penguin) properly ashamed of the inexcusably sloppy job they did printing this. There are several places in the second half where text is suddenly cut off, skipped, or replaced with text that was already printed on an earlier page. Big chunks that I don't see how any proofreader could have missed, like one page ending a paragraph and the next starting mid-sentence. This happened enough that I did actually miss a couple bits out of the story.If he were an Ashanti king, the first person he would sacrifice would be Anthony Gore. He knew that it was wrong to make human sacrifices, but then, if were an Ashanti king in those old days, he would not know this, so it would be all right. He supposed. When they knew better, they stopped doing it. Max wondered if they missed it very much.